The humble blanket has become wiser than the sum of its fibers. To help you sleep better on long-haul flights, British Airways just began testing high-tech blankets that monitor brain waves, changing the fabric’s color according to one’s state of mind. Yes, it’s a mood blanket!

Actually, it’s called the Happiness Blanket because, well, it’s cashmere, and snuggling in cashmere naturally makes you happy. It also has a Bluetooth-connected headband with sensors and fiber optics and probably tiny elf psychics of some sort, which will tell the blanket to radiate a bright red if you’re tense and a brilliant blue if you’re cruising on the calm side of the emotional spectrum.

This should help flight crews determine appropriate light levels in the cabin or which in-flight movies to show. Tip: Don’t show the one with Denzel Washington flying the plane upside down. You don’t need a blanket to tell you that.

Windows- schmindows

Visibility is so 2013. It seems the future of aircraft design may involve eliminating the cockpit windows, moving the pilots to the cargo hold and having them operate flights via electronic view screens instead of physically scanning the wild blue yonder. Let me just say: Yikes!

European aircraft builder Airbus has applied for a patent to develop such designs, reports say. The company offered this scenario as an example: “When the aircraft is in locomotion on the ground and approaches a parking place in an airport, the projected image may be formed by a 3-D reconstitution of the airport.”

Um, isn’t the airport already constituted in real-life 3-D? And wouldn’t that preconstituted image be instantly accessed by, oh, I dunno, looking out the window?

Part of the reason for such a design is practical. Reinforced windows up front are a drag when it comes to aerodynamics. But it’s also financial — the cockpit takes up prime real estate for big-spending first-class passengers.

I do like sitting in the coveted front seats of the Monorail at Disneyland with its big, wide windshield. But the Monorail is attached to a fixed concrete rail, which is connected to permanent structures that are firmly embedded in the nice, solid, reassuring ground. Pilots flying blind? Blanket … glowing … red.

The pizza pilot

If pilots don’t have windows, how will they know when the pizza guy shows up?

Fortunately, Frontier Airlines Capt. Gerhard Bradner — now aka The World’s Most Awesome Pilot — didn’t have that problem when his plane was stuck on the tarmac in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for two hours last week. He called Domino’s and ordered 35 pizzas to appease his 160 passengers. Maybe he took his cue from Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars.

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